Registrations Go Live for a Celebration of the Bizarre And Beautiful with Auckland Fringe 2019

The Plastic Orgasm [Photo credit: Andi Crown Photography]

FESTIVAL DATES:
19th February – 3rd March 2019
Building on a huge 2018 programme that saw 492 creatives take 81 events for ventures around the city for a total of 347 performances, Auckland Fringe returns this summer, running February 19 – March 3, 2019. Registrations are now live for the 2019 programme, calling on artists keen to strut their stuff in all weird and wonderful corners of Tāmaki Makaurau.

Back for its seventh iteration, Auckland Fringe is welcoming artists to sign up to be part of the 2019 programme for this independent and entirely open-access arts festival. After bringing the festival back from the brink in 2017 and officially going annual in 2018, Auckland Fringe is a celebration of otherness and embracing alternate perspectives in Aotearoa’s largest city. Taking to the streets, theatres, beaches, parks, backyards, and all other nooks and crannies for another jaunt, the 2019 eclectic programme will offer even more cutting-edge theatre, music, dance, visual art, comedy, live performance, and all other art forms one could possibly imagine to activate Auckland. Auckland Fringe 2019 also sees the festival return to the high-impact shorter format that resulted in sold percentage of houses growing by a staggering 11% last year.

The 2018 festival stood out as a unique offering in Auckland’s arts landscape, a cultural estuary where community and professional arts meet and mingle. Determined to be accessible, last year saw the average ticket price drop, making Auckland Fringe a sustainable option for both artists with higher ticketed engagement, and audiences at a lower and more risk-encouraging price point. These stats were backed up with post-fest chats; when asked for feedback, 96% of artists and 100% of audiences thought that Auckland Fringe was accessible, inclusive and celebrated difference. A testament to the viability and need for Auckland Fringe, Festival Director Lydia Zanetti is determined to make the 2019 Fringe even better.

“It’s very exciting to be heading into my third Auckland Fringe as director and our second annual festival. We’ve come a long way from the 2017 festival to now, and I look forward to seeing what ballsy offers artists make in response to the year that has been and, more importantly, the year ahead. In return we’ll be offering all the care, support, clout and advice we can to help make Auckland Fringe and the arts in New Zealand an accessible, sustainable, anarchic and key part of our present and future. As the Ghent Manifesto (which Basement Theatre is using as it’s Fringe touchstone) states ‘It’s not just about portraying the world anymore. It’s about changing it.’”
– Lydia Zanetti

With venues across the city ready to host creative exploits of all shapes and forms, registrations are now open for all artists from fully-fledged professionals to those making their first flight out of the nest. Working to an early-bird structure for 2019, the first wave of registrations for the early-bird launch in November close on November 16th, with a final registration date of December 7th.